natural?’ the other guided him, welcoming the new enthusiasm, yet still bewildered by the startling change. It was not mere nerves he saw. There was nothing morbid in it.
‘They’re doing it, I mean, because they have to,’ came the decided answer, ‘and because they feel it. They’re not just copying the world.’ He put his hand upon the other’s arm. There was dry heat in it that Hendricks felt even through his clothes. ‘And that’s what I want,’ the boy went on, raising his voice; ‘what I’ve always wanted without knowing it—real things that can make me alive. I’ve often had it in my dreams, you know, but now I’ve found it.’
‘But I didn’t know. You never told me of those dreams.’
The boy’s cheeks flushed, so that the colour and the fire in his eyes made him positively splendid. He answered slowly, as out of some part he had hitherto kept deliberately concealed.
‘Because I never could get hold of it in words. It sounded so silly even to myself, and I thought Father would train it all away and laugh at it. It’s awfully far down in me, but it’s so real I knew it must come out one day, and that I should find it. Oh, I say, Mr. Hendricks,’ and he lowered his voice, leaning out across the window-sill suddenly, ‘that fills me up and feeds me’—he pointed to the heights—‘and gives me life. The life I’ve seen till now was only a kind of show. It starved me. I want to go up there and feel it pouring through my blood.’ He filled his lungs with the strong mountain air, and paused while he exhaled it slowly, as though tasting it with delight and understanding. Then he burst out again, ‘I vote we go. Will you come with me? What d’you say. Eh?’
They stared at each other hard a moment. Something as primitive and irresistible as love passed through the air between them. With a great effort the older man kept the balance true.
‘Not to-night, not now,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s too late. To-morrow, if you like—with pleasure.’
‘But to-morrow night,’ cried the boy with a rush, ‘when the fires are blazing and the wind is loose. Not in the stupid daylight.’
‘All right. To-morrow night. And my old friend, Monsieur Leysin, shall be our guide. He knows the way, and he knows the people too.’
Lord Ernie seized his hands with enthusiasm. His vigour was so disconcerting that it seemed to affect his physical appearance. The body grew almost visibly; his very clothes hung on him differently; he was no longer a nonentity yawning beneath an ancient pedigree and title; he was an aggressive personality. The boy in him rushed into manhood, as it were, while still retaining boyish speech and gesture. It was uncanny. ‘We’ll go more than once, I vote; go again and again. This is a place and a half. It’s my place with a vengeance——!’
‘Not exactly the kind of place your father would wish you to linger in,’ his tutor interrupted. ‘But we might stay a day or two—especially as you like it so.’
‘It’s far better than the towns and the rotten embassies; better than fifty Simlas and Bombays and filthy Cairos,’ cried the other eagerly. ‘It’s just the thing I need, and when I get home I’ll show ’em something. I’ll prove it. Why, they simply won’t know me!’ He laughed, and his face shone with a kind of vivid radiance in the glare of the electric light. The transformation was more than curious. Waiting a moment to see if more would follow, Hendricks moved slowly then towards the door, with the remark that it was advisable now to go to bed since they would be up late the following night—when he noticed for the first time that the pillow and sheets were crumpled and that the bed had already been lain in. The first suspicion flashed back upon him with new certainty.
Lord Ernie was already taking off his heavy coat, preparatory to undressing. He looked up quickly at the altered tone of voice.
‘Bindy,’ the tutor said with a touch of gravity, ‘you were alone just now—weren’t you—of course?’
The other sat up from stooping over his boots. With his hands resting on the bed behind him, he looked straight into his companion’s eyes. Lying was not among his faults. He answered slowly after a decided interval.
‘I—I was asleep,’ he whispered, evidently trying to be accurate, yet hesitating how to describe the thing he had to say, ‘and had a dream—one of my real, vivid dreams when something happens. Only, this time, it was more real than ever before. It was’—he paused, searching for words, then added—‘sweet and awful.’
And Hendricks repeated the surprising sentence. ‘Sweet and awful, Bindy! What in the world do you mean, boy?’
Lord Ernie seemed puzzled himself by the choice of words he used.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ he went on honestly, ‘only I mean that it was awfully real and splendid, a bit of my own life somewhere—somewhere else—where it lies hidden away behind a lot of days and months that choke it up. I can never get at it except in woods and places, quite alone, hearing the wind or making fires, or—in sleep.’ He hid his face in his hands a moment, then looked up with a hint of censure in his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that such things were done? You never told me,’ he repeated.
‘I didn’t know it myself until this evening. Leysin——’
‘I thought you knew everything,’ Lord Ernie broke in in that same half-chiding tone.
‘Monsieur Leysin told me to-night for the first time,’ said Hendricks firmly, ‘that such people and such practices existed. Till now I had never dreamed that such superstitions survived anywhere in the world at all.’ He resented the reproach. But he was also aware that the boy resented his authority. For the first time his ascendency seemed in question; his voice, his eye, his manner did not quell as formerly. ‘So you mean, when you say “sweet and awful,” that it was very real to you?’ he asked. He insisted now with purpose. ‘Is that it, Bindy?’
The other replied eagerly enough. ‘Yes, that’s it, I think—partly. This time it was more than dreaming. It was real. I got there. I remembered. That’s what I meant. And after I woke up the thing still went on. The man seemed still in the room beside the bed, calling me to get up and go with him——’
‘Man! What man?’ The tutor leant upon the back of a chair to steady himself. The wind just then went past the open windows with a singing rush.
‘The dark man who passed us in the village, and who pointed to the fires on the heights. He came with the wind, you remember. He pulled my coat.’
The boy stood up as he said it. He came across the naked boarding, his step light and dancing. ‘Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind that blows the heart alight, or something—I forget now exactly. You heard it too.’ He whispered the words with excitement, raising his arms and knees as in the opening movements of a dance.
Hendricks kept his own excitement down, but with a distinctly conscious effort.
‘I heard nothing of the kind,’ he said calmly. ‘I was only thinking of getting home dry. You say,’ he asked with decision, ‘that you heard those words?’
Lord Ernie stood back a little. It was not that he wished to conceal, but that he felt uncertain how to express himself. ‘In the street,’ he said, ‘I heard nothing; the words rose up in my own head, as it were. But in the dream, and afterwards too, when I was wide awake, I heard them out loud, clearly: Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind that blows the heart
